Democracy and decentralisation are their watchwords: for Corbyn and McDonnell, it’s municipal socialism reinvented

Thomas Hanna

Joe Guinan

In this article for openDemocracyUK, senior fellow at the Democracy Collaborative and executive director of the Next System Project Joe Guinan, along with the Democracy Collaborative’s director of research Thomas Hanna, discuss the push (and the challenge) for a 21st century socialist political economy in the Labour Party in the UK. Labour Party leaders Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are creating an alternative to the UK’s neoliberal austerity. However, they face an uphill battle as they fight for co-operatives, workplace democracy, and shared ownership in the face of one of the most politically and economically centralised countries in Europe.

Labour’s leaders are creating a new twenty-first century socialist political economy for their party – and one that may require reaching back to some of the left’s lost radical traditions in order to achieve it.